


First, Do No Harm

by athena_crikey



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, Eventual Romance, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2613857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it's hard to see whether Morse will provide the intellectual kinship to keep DeBryn from reaming out his brother officers, or be the one to drive him to distraction. Or, just possibly, fill a different role entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [narrativeimperative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/narrativeimperative/gifts).



DeBryn isn’t in the habit of giving rides to police officers, and certainly not of volunteering them unasked. He doesn’t need to be setting that type of precedent; the Home Office is tight-fisted enough with their mileage remuneration. Besides which, as an outsider working with a sector known for its tight-knit group structure and expectation of a leadership role at most tables, it’s easier to maintain respect through distance. 

But when he sees Morse slouch out of the doors of Cowley Police Station early on the scorching Friday afternoon with his raincoat under his arm as if daring the sky to cloud up, DeBryn can’t help but pause by the side of his car. Anyone else released early on a day like this would be tearing out to enjoy it; Morse is trudging slowly down the front stairs, shoulders hunched and eyes downcast. DeBryn has the sudden perverse desire to offer him a ride, just to pull him out of the sunshine. 

“Afternoon, Morse,” he says over the top of the Morris as the constable passes, causing Morse to startle. He regrets it immediately – as Morse looks up and the sun hits him full on the face, DeBryn can see that what he’s taken for unsociability is in fact either stiffness or pain. The constable’s face is tight with it, jaw tense and eyes lined at the corners. He turns on his ankles to greet DeBryn, rotating his entire body smoothly to avoid twisting his side. DeBryn bites back his frown; after two days Morse should be in better shape than this. 

“Good afternoon, doctor. Were you here to …”

“Drop off the autopsy report on Cronin? Yes. I must just have missed you. Although I hear I’m behind the times. Congratulations on your arrest.”

Morse gives a fleeting smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Thank you.” DeBryn has seen men haunted by failure often enough, but rarely by success. But then, success isn’t often accompanied by so many stretchers in the morgue. 

DeBryn’s initial half-formed joke unexpectedly solidifies into a serious suggestion. “Going home? I could drop you,” he says, indicating the car with a tilt of his head.

Morse hesitates for a moment, then nods. “Thank you, if it’s not out of your way. I’m near Florence park.”

“Get in. Although it is on the warmish side.”

Morse shrugs. “At least the paint isn’t black.” 

The suspension in the Morris was never what one would call mill-pond-smooth, but several recent long drives through the back unpaved roads of rural Oxfordshire have played hell with the springs on the left side. The car jolts as they pull out and continues to shudder at most of the minor faults in the road. Morse, beside him, sits stiff as a man in a backboard, the lines at the corners of his eyes growing steadily deeper. Good posture is one thing, pain is another.

“Something you’d like to tell me?” DeBryn asks pleasantly, watching for the turn; if he doesn’t keep his mind on it, he’ll fall into his usual route back to the hospital.

Morse glances at him, confused. “…I don’t believe so?”

“You’ve torn your stitches, haven’t you?”

He actually glances down, as though he needs to check. “Oh, that. Think I might have. Yes.”

DeBryn resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Did you take any bed rest at all?” 

“Yes,” Morse says, after only a slight pause. He really is a very poor liar.

“At night, I imagine. Florence, did you say?”

“Yes,” answers Morse, immediately this time. DeBryn makes the turn, the sharpness of it eliciting a soft intake of breath from the constable. After a moment he points to a tall block of flats. “I’m on the left; anywhere here is fine. Thank you, doctor.”

DeBryn pulls up, putting the car in park and turning off the engine. “Responsibility discharged? I think not. Pain while walking and sitting, shortness of breath; you need to get that wound checked, Morse.”

“I told you, I re-opened it this morning. I was over-active. Chasing Gull across the roof of Alfredus college, if you want to know,” he says acerbically, fingers tapping on the door handle. 

“I am now totally reassured as to your sense of responsibility and good judgement. Out you get.” DeBryn gets out himself without waiting, walking around to pull his medical kit from the boot – far smaller than the pathologist’s box to its right. By the time he’s brought it out Morse is standing on the building’s front step looking pale and sullen. He lets them into the narrow staircase beyond without a word, leading the way up. 

Morse makes it about halfway before he has to take hold of the handrail and another third of the way beyond that before he has to stop altogether, arm wrapped around his left side, hunched over and breathing hard.

“Don’t push; just wait. We have time,” says DeBryn. Morse makes a soft noise of frustration but thankfully for once does as he’s told. He stands facing the wall with his forehead resting against the faded wallpaper, eyes closed, the faint hallway lights painting shadowy sickles under his cheekbones. 

It’s no more than a minute before the muscle spasm passes and Morse is able to finish the trip, unlocking the door at the top of the stairs and letting them into his tiny flat. He hangs his coat on the door of an ancient wardrobe as he passes through the room and takes a seat at one of two flimsy chairs beside a table sitting in a long strip of sun. DeBryn follows him over, setting his case on the second chair. “Pull up your shirt,” he instructs, before going into the kitchen. 

It’s not a kitchen many people could have made their own: tiny, chipping paint and cracked tiles, no storage space and no windows. Morse hasn’t tried – he’s abandoned the necessary items to their fates in whatever corners or cubbies can house them, and brought the rest into the main sitting room. It’s there that DeBryn finds a reasonably clean glass – Morse probably won’t look too closely, and in any case he knows the risks – and the scotch. 

When he returns Morse has shed his jacket, shirt and tie and pulled his vest up to the bottom of his ribcage. He’s been taping gauze over the wound with strips of plaster, DeBryn sees; it’s stained the dark rusty-brown of dried blood. 

DeBryn sets the scotch down on the table: “Drink that.” He snaps open his bag and starts pulling out his supplies – gloves, swabs, saline solution, rubbing alcohol, gauze. “The spasm on the stairway. How often has that happened?” he asks casually, eyes on his materials. 

Morse picks up the glass, taking short drinks between sentences. “That was just the second time. The first was this morning… at Alfredus College.”

“On the roof?” asks DeBryn, with only a slight touch of wryness. 

“Yes; there were several flights of stairs, and a dust-up with Gull. I thought the stitches had held up until I started down. It was very tender and sore at first, and I knew I must’ve split them; then almost at the bottom of the stairs the pain became… extreme.” Morse winces, tracing a thumb across his left eyebrow. “But I waited for a few minutes, and it passed.” 

DeBryn finishes setting out his supplies. “It’s a muscle spasm. All the damaged tissue here,” he pulls the gauze away with careful fingers and points, “is muscle. When you exert yourself it contracts, and opens the wound again little by little. If you exert yourself enough the muscle becomes extremely upset and begins to spasm, resulting in considerable pain. You may also be pleased to know that you have indeed pulled out your stitches,” he concludes.

He pulls his gloves on, wets a swab with saline, and begins to clean the wound; Morse sets his jaw, the tendons in his neck and shoulders tensing. “There’s nothing dangerous to muscle spasms; they cause no permanent damage. Continually reopening wounds, however, can lead to failure to heal, infection, sepsis and serious illness.”

“It’s just a cut!” says Morse, staring.

DeBryn looks back, tone measured. “It’s an injury that required medical attention and special care, which you have failed to employ.” 

“Because lives were at stake! A child could have died. Inspector Thursday could have died. I didn’t need to be… lying about on a sofa,” he says irritated, waving a hand in a frustrated gesture. 

“Did you need to be brawling on rooftops?” snaps DeBryn. He knows as soon as he does that he’s gone too far. Morse’s eyes flash, startlingly bright. But instead of the affront DeBryn is expecting there’s just a quiet hurt in his face and his voice – DeBryn isn’t sure he even realises it’s there.

“It wasn’t like that,” he says, hissing as DeBryn sanitizes the wound in quick, efficient moves. “It wasn’t – some dramatic scene, good versus evil, staring into the Devil’s eyes and triumphing over him. It was just… horrible and petty and disgusting. He killed innocent people, took their lives away, for his own amusement. I’m not trying to be a hero, and I certainly have no intentions of being a martyr, but I will never let someone get away with murder because I didn’t try hard enough.” He looks DeBryn straight in the eye as he speaks, and it isn’t pride or bravado that the pathologist sees there, but simply intense commitment. 

It is at this moment that DeBryn realises that, one way or another, Morse is a man to watch. He will either rise high in his profession, or he will burn out, probably spectacularly. 

“I think I see now why you were the one to catch Gull.” 

Morse blinks and DeBryn does see affront now, razor-sharp. “What does that mean?” he demands, voice hard.

DeBryn puts down the cleaning swabs and angles his head, speaking calmly. “Simply that there are not many types of detectives that I’ve encountered, Morse. By far the most common are those who do this as nothing more than a job – they may be good or bad at it, they may be naïve or lazy or corrupt or hard-working – but at the end of the day they go home and they’re done. Then there are a few – good men, mostly, but some brownnosers and supercilious weasels – who go above and beyond because they know that’s what the job needs. But I can count on one finger the number of coppers I’ve met who felt that they were working not to the hours, or even to the work, but to a higher sense of justice. And I’m not sure yet whether I think that’s incredibly admirable, or incredibly stupid.”

Morse opens his mouth, closes it, then shakes his head, apparently lost for words. It’s the first time DeBryn’s ever known the constable not to have a reply at hand.

“He really got to you, this Gull, didn’t he?” DeBryn asks, picking up his needle and the sterile suture package. Morse narrows his eyes as though squinting into the sun, lips curling to reveal the edges of his teeth. 

“I just don’t – understand. I know I don’t have to. But – four people are dead. How can that be for nothing? And yet… it was.” He stares at DeBryn, squint easing into simple pain.

“The physician under whom I did my residency in pathology fancied himself a philosopher; I must admit, I found it generally tedious at the time. He did have one or two pieces of relevant advice gleaned from his hobby, though, one of which you might consider – ‘And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’ It doesn’t do to dwell on the madness behind murder; sooner or later, it will begin to weigh on you.”

“I’ve never been an admirer of Nietzsche,” says Morse tiredly, but in a begrudging way that suggests he might take at least some of the sentiment to heart. DeBryn feels his eyebrows rising despite himself, impressed by Morse’s sourcing of the quote. 

To hide it he raises the needle, now threaded, and looks at the constable; Morse swallows but gives a jerky one-sided shrug, immediately tensing as if to spring. “Good, you’ve achieved the opposite posture required,” DeBryn says pleasantly and with only mild sarcasm. “Now try to relax, please.”

Morse gives him a long-suffering look, but slowly exhales and loosens his muscles. DeBryn sits down and begins stitching. 

He works in silence; it’s unfair to expect Morse to participate in a conversation with his jaw clenched shut and in considerable pain, and he works faster that way in any case. DeBryn puts the stitches in further from the wound but closer together this time, keeping his work very fine even though it would be faster and easier to put in larger stitches. He does it partially for the strength of the stitch but partially out of pride to see the job done well. And, although he wouldn’t admit it, just a little to keep Morse’s as-of-yet unblemished torso from being marred, especially by a lunatic like Gull. 

“There,” he says, tying off the end, “finished. You held nearly as still as my usual patients; well done. There should be almost no scar as long as you don’t rip it out again; if you do it will be sutures in Casualty, and it’ll end up looking like someone drove a tank over you.”

“Thank you,” grits out Morse, slumping down into a more relaxed position. DeBryn quickly dresses the wound, then begins re-packing his bag. 

“After pulling those stitches, it’s going to be even more tender, and it’s possible you might start having more muscle spasms; I have some muscle relaxants I can leave you just in case – one every four hours, no alcohol, no driving. Bed rest today and tomorrow – no stairs for the rest of the weekend. I mean it, Morse. Or it’ll be Casualty,” DeBryn warns, doing his best to look severe.

“And the tank treads, I recall,” nods Morse, rolling down his vest and pulling his shirt back on over top without bothering to button it up. 

“Your dedication to your profession is admirable. But you’re not much good to it out of commission. Just – try to take better care of yourself?” DeBryn stands, digging out the bottle of Metaxalone and pouring several tablets into an empty bottle to leave behind for Morse. 

As he leaves he hears the soft crackle of a needle over vinyl, and turns to see Morse standing beside a turntable. His untucked shirt is hanging loosely about him like a painter’s smock, red hair glowing in a fiery tangle in the bright sunlight streaming through the window, his trousers dirty, his vest bloody; all in all he looks not a little like an escaped madman himself. As DeBryn opens the door, the record begins to play. Opera. Of course. 

DeBryn shakes his head and lets himself out. 

\-----------------------------------

DeBryn glances up as the two detectives enter, repressing the urge to quote Macbeth’s witches – Morse will be unimpressed by the levity; Jakes will simply miss the point. 

Spoken or not, the parallel is fair enough. As with the crones, the three of them only ever assemble when ill fortune is afoot. Tonight it’s a young undergrad who lies dead on his own carpet, face discoloured by a rash and swollen lips. An overturned tumbler of what appears to be whiskey lies by his hand. DeBryn looks to the two policemen as he waits for the thermometer’s mercury to rise. 

“Death more likely caused by anaphylaxis than alcohol.” He shakes his head; here, at least, familiarity has yet to beget contempt. Just sorrow for a young life cut short.

“His landlady says it’s the cat,” reports Jakes, drolly. Morse, currently staring at the curtains with apparent interest, looks back to the sergeant without letting his eyes fall to the floor. DeBryn looks down to the thermometer, nearly ready, while Jakes continues: “She says she never had any trouble ‘til she started allowing pets this term – twenty years without a complaint, now this two weeks after she let the girl downstairs keep her tabby.” 

“Post hoc,” says DeBryn absently, removing the thermometer and noting the temperature in his book. 

“What?”

“Ergo propter hoc,” finishes Morse helpfully. DeBryn looks up in time to see Jakes’ blank stare, and Morse’s transition from a man making an obvious statement to a man making a statement that has turned out not to be. He reaches up to tug unconsciously at his ear, head canting awkwardly to the side. “It’s a logical fallacy – assuming that since one event occurred after the other it was caused by the other.”

Jakes gives him a disgusted look. “Right then, professor. You’re so keen on schooling, you can stay here and collect the pathologist’s report. Bring it back to the nick when you’re done.” He turns and walks out, rolling his eyes. Morse watches him go with an expression of poorly disguised irritation. It changes to alarm a second later and he makes to reach out, as if it might bring Jakes back.

“But – you’ve got the car…” His arm falls back and he sighs. Only then does he seem to remember he has an audience, and looks back to DeBryn. 

“No, you can’t have a ride,” says DeBryn, taking a blind guess and, from the look on Morse’s face, hitting the target. “But there’s a pub down the block with a bus stop outside. Let me finish up and give you my preliminary findings, then we can have a pint.”

“The report –”

“It’s already after six, Morse. You can hand it in tomorrow, can’t you?”

Morse frowns. “I suppose so, but why?”

DeBryn pauses, notebook in hand, thumb pressed in between the pages to keep his place. He considers for a moment, then wets his lips, “‘Happy the man, whose wish and care,  
A few paternal acres bound,’” he pauses, looking to Morse, who frowns but continues as easily as if he were reading from a book.

“‘Content to breathe his native air, In his own ground.’ ‘Ode on Solitude.’ What of it?”

“Morse, most of my time is spent translating complicated medical terminology into very simple ideas for coppers who are only interested in determining, in the immortal words of DI Chard, ‘who hit who with what.’ They are not only uninterested in words longer than two syllables, they are generally offended by them. Just occasionally, it’s pleasant to reassure myself that there are those who are aware that Paul VI isn’t the only Pope we are graced with. Perhaps you can understand?” 

“Perhaps I can.” Morse runs a finger along underneath his collar, straightening a slight unevenness. He’s standing slightly at an angle to DeBryn, an artifact of his initial entry and his careful positioning to keep the body in his peripheral vision. His eyes flash for an instant to the door, following the path sergeant Jakes took a few minutes ago.

DeBryn nods. “I’ll be finished in ten minutes.”

\---------------------------------------------

It’s a Tuesday evening in North Oxford, and the pub is quiet. Morse off-duty at the bottom of his third pint is surprisingly the same as usual, if perhaps more intensely so – honest, cerebral and impoliticly straight-forward. 

“In my experience, most coppers join up because they’ve enough sense to find an employ which is mostly indoors with no heavy lifting, but not enough brains for a desk job,” he tells Morse, looking up through the cleaner tops of his glasses. “You seem to have the opposite endowment. Taken together with your necrophobia, I would say it’s a bit of a puzzler as to why you’re in the Force.”

Morse holds his stein in both hands, rocking it back and forth gently on the table; it’s nearly empty, amber liquid lapping up against the sides. He watches it for a moment before looking up from under his brows, face mostly in shadows in the poorly lit booth. 

“I was in Signals before coming here. I enjoyed the actual work – the codes and cyphers. But there was so much bureaucracy it seemed to stifle the actual work; you spent as much time making sure you had logged yourself in and out of a room properly or requesting access to a file as ever working with information. So I left that, and came here. I wanted to do work that would make a difference, help people. They told me in Carshall I was overqualified for the post of PC, but as I hadn’t been through the Academy they couldn’t give me anything else; that was fine – I didn’t know how to do the job so I couldn’t very well have started anywhere else anyway. As for the …necrophobia,” he glances at DeBryn, shrugs, “that was unexpected. I’m getting better.”

DeBryn finishes his own drink. “Like any Greats scholar you have the irritating habit of beginning _in medias res_ , but I suppose I won’t press.”

Morse gives him a quick, sudden smile, and DeBryn reads appreciation there. “Still, it must have been rather a bugger to enter your profession only to discover a fear of corpses,” he continues. “I hadn’t realised it was a hitherto undiagnosed complaint.”

“Well, it’s not as though you come upon them regularly in the post office,” says Morse, somewhat testily. “In any case, I don’t fear them. They just make me … ill,” he finishes obliquely, in what DeBryn suspects is a synonym for light-headed. 

“Why is that, do you think?”

Morse shifts abruptly, straightening and narrowing his eyes. “Why does death and blood and gore make me ill? Isn’t that the normal reaction?” His skin is flushing involuntarily, cheeks and the tips of his ears turning red with irritation or perhaps embarrassment. 

“You find death disgusting?” asks DeBryn, tone carefully neutral. He’s dealt with the whole range of reactions to death: fear, sadness, horror, disgust. The latter is certainly the one he has least time for. It’s also not what he would have diagnosed as Morse’s problem – and he hopes, selfishly, that he’s right. 

Morse shrugs, calming down somewhat. “The circumstances of it often are. Very often, in our work. I suppose you expected it, though, getting into it,” he says, apparently trying to change the topic. DeBryn lets him.

“Oh, like you, I didn’t end up where I started. I never intended to become a pathologist. By the time I was finishing my MD, I had decided to specialise in orthopaedics.”

Morse raises his eyebrows. “What happened?”

“My mother passed away. She and my father were vacationing in Cornwall. She fell ill very abruptly, and died two days later. There was a post-mortem, which reported no significant findings other than minor weakness in the heart tissue common to her age, yet her death was ruled preliminarily due to heart-failure. When the lab results came back two weeks later – it was the height of summer – they revealed major salmonella infection. Her body was exhumed and re-examined, revealing signs of a significant infection. I subsequently learned that the original pathologist had a reputation for slipshod practices and liquid lunches; he was sacked a year or so later.

“I suppose the point is that, like you, I went into my profession to help people. Well, the dead are people too, Morse. They still need decency, respect, and help – often more than the living.”

Morse flinches, just a tiny muscle twitch, but still perceptible. DeBryn pretends not to notice. 

“Thousands of young men and women become doctors every year, and the best and brightest go into the high-paying specialties – I wouldn’t be missed there. But I knew I could do some real good in a specialty everyone else regarded as the dead-end of medicine. So here I am.”

There’s a pause, Morse tracing an absent finger around the rim of his stein. For a moment, DeBryn has the impression that he’s trying to find words to take back his earlier flippancy with. But in his admittedly brief association with Morse, DeBryn has already formed the impression of the young constable as a man who only moves forwards, never backwards. When he speaks, that impression is borne out. 

“Do you regret it?” asks Morse, eyes earnest. 

DeBryn sits back, removing his glasses and cleaning them on his handkerchief . Without them Morse’s face is a slightly lilac-hued blur in the shadows, his usually-bright hair a bird’s nest of rusts and golds. 

“Since I took my post, no autopsy of mine has been exhumed, none of my files have officially been called into question by court or another medical practitioner, I have received no official complaints from family members, and I have had only one injury associated with my work – you. I have no regrets, except perhaps inviting you to that autopsy.” He puts his glasses back on, glancing wryly at Morse’s once-again sharp features. “You have rather marred my record.”

Morse’s lips crook upwards at the corners. “My apologies. Should I get the next round in compensation?” 

DeBryn glances at his watch. “No – I should push off. I too have notes to make, not all of which can wait; blood samples go out tonight. Thank you for the company, Morse. We should do it again.” 

Morse nods as DeBryn stands and makes his way out of the booth, remaining seated himself. “Doctor.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My intention to note this in Chapter 1 was thwarted by my memory fail. This fic takes as canon only what we know in Endeavour (partly because I have almost no knowledge of the Morse canon). I have the vague suspicion that DeBryn actually has a family, but as Endeavour hasn't done anything to suggest that other than one tiny and very ambiguous reference in Neverland, I am running under the canon that he is a bachelor.

DeBryn is sitting on a picnic table by the side of the river in the bright afternoon sun watching the ducks swim past in lazy lines, wondering:

1\. Why on earth he’s here; and,  
2\. Who he can complain to about it. 

Just as he’s beginning to tally up a mental bill for his wasted time a shadow slants down over him. He looks up to see Morse standing beside him, frowning. 

“Doctor. I had a report of a body found on the riverside.”

“Ah, Morse,” begins DeBryn, in his driest tone. “Yes, you may well be puzzled by the lack of an apparent corpus. Be reassured, it is apparently here somewhere. Having successfully identified life as being extinct – I am told – the PC who found the body then abandoned it in the reeds to make a report. The river’s flow being what it is, the body has probably washed back out again. The Cherwell is thick with weeds here, so likely it’s been caught by them and pulled under. The divers are in there now looking for it. Some bright light among the initial responders decided, lest they miss a moment of time upon the re-discovery of the corpse, they had better contact me immediately. And apparently you as well,” he adds, as an afterthought.

Morse looks from DeBryn out at the river, running smoothly but quickly past the green banks, and then sighs and drops down onto the bench beside him. “Any details on the corpse?”

“Middle-aged man, dark hair,” says DeBryn. “Hardly a complete description.”

“Certainly not enough to identify him if they don’t find the body.” Morse stares out over the water glumly, eyes flashing to the ripples on the surface. DeBryn settles back, doing the same.

“Indeed not,” he says, somberly. “Another potentially suspicious death. Perhaps August is in fact the cruelest month.”

Morse glances at him sharply and he gives a small, wry twist of his lips. 

“Speaking of that,” begins Morse after a moment, turning away from the water as for the first time his face takes on real animation, “Have you seen that new anthology released to commemorate Eliot’s death?”

DeBryn nods. “I had that misfortune. As unimaginative, ill-conceived and generally dull a forward as I’ve ever encountered.”

Morse waves this away impatiently. “The forward? What about the selection? Was it compiled by the Beats? They could hardly have done worse had they tried. Even a lack of imagination would have been preferable to the miserable effect achieved by skipping about chronologically and thematically. Thank God I only borrowed it from the library,” he finishes, as though owning it would have been painful to him. But although DeBryn’s own feelings on the anthology aren’t nearly as strong as Morse’s he knows the sentiment perfectly: the dull, sandpaper chafe of seeing a hated book on one’s shelf nestled between innocents like a viper in a cradle.

“They did leave out the majority of the cat poems,” points out DeBryn.

Morse shakes his head, unimpressed. “That’s not enough. They could have left them all out and it still wouldn’t have been enough.”

“Never had a cat, did you Morse?”

Before the constable can answer there’s a cry from the water, and a distant splashing. They both look over. In the centre of the river one black-suited head emerges, then a second. Then, behind them, a dark shape slowly rises to the surface.

“‘Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long,’” says Morse as he rises; together, they walk down the bank to meet the divers. 

\--------------------------------------------------------

DeBryn is called out early in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness to examine the body of an elderly woman found in Florence park. She’s a resident in a nearby building, 79, and shows no signs of violence, just some scrapes and bruises from a fall. It’s possible that she was knocked down, but equally possible that the fall was caused by a spell of dizziness or a heart attack. 

She died sometime in the evening, her body lying slightly hidden in some shrubs, where it went undiscovered until just after daybreak. As such it’s DI Chard’s men who have charge of the case. DeBryn conducts his preliminary examination while ignoring the brunt of their questions and suggestions, the majority of which are apparent, facetious, or lewd. They’re used to this in him, and continue on happily amongst themselves.

He’s nearly done when one of the two constables glances at him as if struck by a particularly important thought. “Oi, doc, you’re sure this isn’t a sex case, are you?” he asks, with mock seriousness. 

DeBryn looks up with a cold face, real anger slicing in deep under his skin like shards of ice. 

“Feel free to leave,” he says, stonily. “I can communicate my results to DI Chard.” From behind there’s a rustling in the underbrush, but he ignores it.

“We need the prelim,” protests McGregor, the quicker of the two. DeBryn raises his eyebrows.

“No, you would like it. Any findings granted prior to the autopsy are given solely at my discretion. You can tell DI Chard he may expect the initial results late this afternoon.” He stands and watches as they try to stare him down and then, apparently deciding this will be unsuccessful, sulk off towards the main path.

“Good morning, doctor,” says a quiet voice from behind him. DeBryn turns to see Morse standing with his hands in his pockets, watching him with subtle interest. “I see you’re having a busy morning.” 

“There are times I regret my chosen profession, Morse,” says DeBryn with some acid, as they watch Chard’s lackeys leave. The two men trample their way towards the cars, arguing with sharp gestures. 

Morse shrugs. “There are times I’m ashamed by my colleagues. I’m sure it’s much the same everywhere.” 

“Sadly, I fear so.” DeBryn looks down at the corpse. “Do you want…?”

Morse shakes his head regretfully. “Not my case.”

“Then why are you here?” asks DeBryn, frowning. Morse is certainly dressed as usual – his light rain coat over a dark suit and navy tie, his hair already mussed by the morning’s light wind. 

“I was just on my way to work and saw the uniforms; I stopped by to see what had happened.”

“Of course, Florence Park.” DeBryn glances through the trees towards the street – Morse’s flat is just in the next block over. “Do you know her?”

He watches as Morse steps over, hands slipping from his pockets, sees the inhalation and the twitch of his fingers. Morse’s gaze drops with a flick of his eyes and holds for one, two, three seconds. Then he’s looking back at the trees. 

“No. I don’t know her. But I don’t spend much time in the neighbourhood.”

DeBryn nods. “Alright. Thank you.”

“Happy to oblige. Besides, it’s not every day one sees McGregor and Graham taken to task. They won’t be pleased,” he adds, in a quieter voice.

“That’s their problem, not mine. There’s something you’ve yet to learn, Morse: constables wait on the favour of the pathologist, not the other way around. There’s only one of me, but a dozen of you. Well – perhaps not you, fortunately,” he amends, and sees Morse’s surprised smile flash like sunlight through a break in the clouds. “Regardless, the burden of good behaviour rests on them, not me. And I won’t abide by callousness or cruelty.”

Morse inclines his head. “No; I suppose not. Good day, doctor – I need to get to work. I’ll see you later.” He gives DeBryn a wider, kinder smile, and hikes off through the underbrush towards the road.

\--------------------------------------------------------

The night air is cold and nippy, autumn’s sharp fingers beginning to slice in beneath DeBryn’s thick wool coat. He’s visiting Alfredus college late for the medical library there; walking back to his car in the dark, he admires the way the streetlamps seem surrounded by warm halos of light – something about the cool night air at this time of year. The leaves are turning, and those trees nearest the lights shine in hues of gold. He picks his way along the ancient path, careful of the uneven cement and damp leaves, passing by the narrow college chapel.

Here the doors have been thrown open, either in welcome or against over-active heaters, and from inside he can hear a choir singing – something very baroque, with considerable harmony. He steps up out of the way of a group of students hurrying towards Hall, and recognizing the hymn, passes into the building. 

The chapel is very long and narrow, with tall wooden stands holding the pews on either side of a black and white marble floor. The choir is in the stands on the right, with a few spectators sitting on the left. DeBryn slips in and joins their number, just as the hymn – Dona Nobis Pacem – finishes. The singers fold up their music while the conductor gives out notices, then they begin filing out, many remaining to chat. DeBryn spots a familiar face towards the back and slips out as Morse exits the last stand, his music in a folder at his side. He glances at DeBryn in surprise.

“I was passing by. Heard the music and stopped in,” explains DeBryn. “Can’t say I’ve ever had much time for Bach, although I suppose one can’t argue with the sentiment.”

They step out into the cold, Morse pulling on his coat. They turn without discussion towards the nearest pub, The Rook.

They’ve met here occasionally by chance before – Morse sings with TOSCA weekly when he can, and DeBryn is often at Alfredus’ medical library. Oxford isn’t a big city; once or twice they’ve met simply on the street. Usually they discuss literature or academic principles, sometimes cases, occasionally history or current events. 

Tonight, though, Morse mostly seems interested in downing his pints as rapidly as possible. He finishes two in ten minutes, and asks for a third. He’s slouched forward over the table, resting both elbows on its surface like a puppet with his strings cut – not unusual for pub-goers, but Morse generally has excellent posture. There’s an odd look in his face, not anger or sadness or disappointment, or any of the usual suspects when it comes to heavy drinking. Restlessness, DeBryn decides, without being sure if he’s right. 

They order food – good for Morse’s liver, and DeBryn’s empty stomach – and continue talking in a circumspect way about nothing in particular. The table beside them is taken up with noisy undergraduates, a hazard of staying so close to college. 

“Do you remember the war?” Morse asks suddenly, looking up. Their food has just arrived, two plates of fish and chips, but he hasn’t touched his. 

“Yes. Don’t you?”

Morse shakes his head. “A few specific things – our block was evacuated once by an unexploded bomb, hearing that my uncle had been killed, V-E Day. That sort of thing. Mainly just the atmosphere, though, the constant tension, the fear.”

“Well, you were only,” DeBryn glances at Morse, trying to estimate his age and work backwards, “eight, nine in ’45?”

“Seven,” says Morse with a shrug.

“There you are. I was thirteen. Why?”

Morse picks up a chip, staring at it unseeingly. “Something Inspector Thursday said,” he says. And then, a moment later, “‘You’re too young to remember.’ I suppose I am, But…”

“It hurts to be discounted?” suggests DeBryn. Morse shakes his head, glancing up. 

“No – yes – I don’t know.” He eats the chip desultorily, then another. “To be judged and discounted based on our pasts, things we can’t control.” He shakes his head. He’s not making much sense, and DeBryn has the feeling that he’s not talking about Thursday anymore, or not entirely. 

“I suppose that our pasts brought us to where we are today – as pieces of the greater whole that is each of us, they can’t be thrown away or erased. But they aren’t more than that; they aren’t some free-standing object to be removed and considered separate to us, much less judged. Is that what you mean?”

Morse looks at him slowly, thoughtfully. “Maybe. If not – maybe it ought to have been.”

The table beside them picks up in volume, and they concentrate on their meals for a while. 

“There was this girl,” he says in a quieter voice, sometime later after another pint, and DeBryn thinks that he’s a little tight now. “We knew each other when we were up, and she suggested we might see one another. It didn’t work out. She thought I was living in the past, in the shadow of… someone else, and then seemed to find that in fact she was – or perhaps we both were.” He shakes his head, tangling his fingers in his hair. 

“I don’t know,” he says, voice muffled, speaking to the table. “Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m holding onto something I can’t see.” He pulls his hands down, rests them on the table in front of him as if he might see the invisible shadow of his past there between them. 

DeBryn looks at him, curled awkwardly over the table, expression so intense – as if he were trying to solve a matter of life and death, rather than ruminating on the vagaries of emotion. Morse all over. 

Not for the first time, he wonders what it was that happened when Morse was up, what went wrong. He’s never asked; Morse clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. But whatever it was, he’s quite sure it wasn’t Morse’s academic prowess that was at issue. 

“If so, is that so odd? Nature abhors a vacuum, Morse. It’s hard to cut all past sentiment out of your heart when there’s nothing there to replace it with. I’m sure when someone new presents themselves, you’ll manage alright.”

Morse stares for a moment, then gives a half-sceptical, half-amused grin. “It’s possible, I suppose.”

“Only one way to find out – find someone and see what happens. Let me know what you uncover.” DeBryn finishes his drink and pulls some money out of his wallet. “Do you need a ride home?” 

Morse shakes his head. “It’s out of your way. I’ll take the bus.”

DeBryn stands, clapping Morse’s shoulder. “Don’t refuse a free gift, Morse, it may not come again,” he says jokingly. Morse blinks but smiles and after pulling out his own change rises to accompany DeBryn. 

\------------------------------------------------

It’s late November, dead leaves blowing in the pub door whenever it’s opened, by the time DeBryn gently points out that Morse might do better not to be seen meeting socially with the Home Office pathologist. If he’s lucky it will be taken for brownnosing, and if not for an attempt to regain some lost social rungs, and either way he doesn’t have the popularity to lose. 

Really, he should have brought it up sooner, but it’s Morse’s concern, not his. He wouldn’t have said anything if he weren’t mindful of the fact that Morse has the political awareness of a lemming. 

The truth of it is that he never expected to be meeting nearly weekly with Morse – with any police officer, although Morse has superseded the confines of that category. In DeBryn’s mind he’s no longer defined by his profession, he is his own person entirely, and a friend. A friend whose somewhat shaky career DeBryn is endangering. 

Morse stares for a moment after DeBryn makes this suggestion, visibly taken aback. Then – to DeBryn’s shock – he shakes his head, discounting it immediately without further thought. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. I don’t care.”

“That’s very upstanding, Morse, but you might want to give a bit more thought to avoiding damage to your career.”

“By which you mean my reputation?” Morse smiles sardonically. “Thank you for your concern, doctor. But unless you’re trying to get rid of me...?”

DeBryn shakes his head slowly. “That is certainly not my intention,” he says, truthfully. 

Morse shifts in his seat, opening his shoulders and adjusting his legs. He’s never stationary for long, always moving, can’t or won’t be held still. It’s probably his ridiculously over-active brain that drives him, keeping him constantly over-wound. “Then enough said. I decided several years ago that I couldn’t worry about other peoples’ opinions of me, or I’d never get anywhere. I’m not about to start again now.” 

DeBryn leaves it at that; after all, it’s Morse’s look-out. Frankly, he has no inclination to stop. 

In fact, he’s enjoying spending time with Morse much more than he would have imagined. What worries him a little is how pleased he is that apparently Morse enjoys it enough to endanger his already tenuous social position at the station continuing on. 

\--------------------------------------------------------

Morse stops by his office in mid-December to pick up his report on a sudden death, and ask after a round of drinks in the process. 

DeBryn nods vaguely in agreement, handing Morse the manila file with his full report in it. Morse takes it but doesn’t leave, cocking his head slightly. “Is something wrong, doctor?”

DeBryn looks up to see Morse watching him closely, carefully. So often when they talk the constable is concentrating on their discussion, or investigating the scene of crime. It’s relatively rare that the full weight of his gaze falls squarely on DeBryn, and DeBryn finds himself suddenly reminded of how piercing it is. To distract himself from that sudden unsettling attention, he nods at the file in Morse’s hands.

“The cause of death was undoubtedly cerebral trauma – the question is the cause of the trauma. The scene of crime, and to an extent the nature of the blow itself suggest something heavy, solid and flat.” The body was found on the edge of a swimming pool, with no signs of violence or injuries other than the head wound. 

“The tiling,” says Morse, in a tone that suggests he’s aware that it’s the obvious answer, and is waiting for DeBryn to show him why it shouldn’t be. 

“It’s entirely possible,” agrees DeBryn, “and I think most pathologists would sign off on it. But…” he shakes his head, standing and rounding his desk. Coming to stand beside Morse’s shoulder, he flips open the report to the page showing the pictures of the head, on which he’s indicated the location of the wound. 

The diagrams are provided by the Home Office, standard across the country, and in this case are really too small and at a poor angle for the job. “Our victim cracked her skull here” – he indicates it on the drawing with his finger, and then, finding that inadequate, reaches up and draws an identical line to the fracture along Morse’s skull. His fingers sweep easily through Morse’s thick hair, too short to tangle them. He should know; he’s seen Morse twist his fingers through it often enough. 

“The posterior parietal area is the thickest part of the skull, especially here between the superior and sagittal sutures.” He indicates them as well with a quick, cursory pressure of his fingertips, feeling the gentle warmth below – rare, in his line of work.

It’s only then that he realises that he’s standing what should be uncomfortably close to Morse, using him as a live anatomical model – and that far from feeling awkward about it, he acted without noticing his leap across social boundaries. Morse is still watching him with that same unwavering gaze, apparently – surprisingly – unbothered by his slip. 

DeBryn steps back and shrugs in what he hopes seems a natural manner, and continues on. “If she had died from a blow to the back of the skull, I wouldn’t have had any misgivings. But the wound is too high – it would be hard for that to be the point of impact for a fall to begin with, and even if it were, she’s hardly tall enough to have the height to crack the skull there. I’m inclined to view the death as suspicious,” he finishes, settling into the opinion as he says it out loud. 

Morse nods, heading for the door. “Alright. We’ll start speaking to her friends.” He pauses, hand on the door frame. “A pint – at six?” he asks, in a lighter tone. DeBryn nods once, and the constable disappears out into the morgue, footsteps echoing on the tile. 

DeBryn refuses to allow himself to think any more on the encounter – to do so would be either merely indulgence or irritant, and either way get him no further forward. At least, so he tells himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DeBryn and Morse both quote T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (DeBryn paraphrasing); Eliot died in January '65.


	3. Chapter 3

DeBryn is in his office preparing to go home one dark January evening when a call comes through from the police dispatcher; there are several dispatchers, but they all have the same stark official tone. “Pathology – Dr DeBryn?”

DeBryn sighs but answers in the affirmative. 

“There have been two deaths reported in North Oxford, one a result of a police shooting; we need an official pronouncement. Can you go immediately?”

DeBryn looks up, police shootings are rare, and generally mean intensive investigations both within the Force and the media. “Yes. Where?”

The dispatcher gives him the address and he sweeps up his coat and notebook on his way out the door.

It’s a short drive from the hospital, roads not quite busy yet with evening traffic, lit all the way with buttery streetlamps. It’s warmed up a bit since the last snowfall, no ice, and he makes good time.

There’s a Jaguar parked outside the house, and DeBryn frowns as he pulls up. Uniform rarely drive them, nor would a lone officer carry a gun. CID, almost certainly. He fetches his pathology kit from the boot and hurries up the front steps; as he does so he catches sight of another car turning into the street – a marked police car.

The door to the house is open, and he steps into a narrow hallway with open doorways to both the left and right. “Hello?

“DeBryn,” comes Inspector Thursday’s terse voice from the right, and he follows it. He steps into the room to see a woman lying dead on the floor in front of him, clouded eyes staring up at the ceiling. The front of her tweed jacket and silk blouse are soaked in dark, wet blood, but not more than half a pint – an almost instantaneous death. 

At the front of the room by the windows which face out over the street lies a second body, Thursday kneeling by it. 

It’s Morse, lying on his back with his head thrown backwards, face very white.

DeBryn hears his breath catching in his throat. In his ears, the sound of it is like something tearing – the past ripping away from the future, split inexorably by the scene in front of him. Something in his chest begins to ache, and absently he realises that for the first time in a long time he doesn’t have a medical term for it.

But an instant later he sees Morse’s chest rise, his eyes sliding open as he turns his head to look for DeBryn. 

Not dead. Not dead. Not dead. The words pound through his head in time with his heartbeat, too visceral to be contained. 

Thank God.

DeBryn steps closer on shaky legs to see that Morse’s trousers are hitched down below his hips, his shirt and underwear bloody. 

After the scene that greeted him at the door, this is hardly enough to raise his pulse. He doesn’t pause, just walks right over to Morse and kneels down. “How soon will the ambulance be here?” he asks, carefully peeling away the sodden shirt tail and then ripping open the hole the bullet sliced in Morse’s boxers. From the looks of the wound and the amount of pain Morse is in, the bullet entered about half an inch under the greater trochanter of the femur, narrowly missing the bone. Thursday has elevated Morse’s legs and kept firm pressure on the wound, reducing the blood loss – thank God for veterans.

There’s a moment of silence, and he looks up at Thursday, who frowns. “There isn’t one. He felt you could take care of it.”

On the other hand, what he feels about over-indulgent DIs and their pig-headed bagmen could, at this moment, fill a decent-sized treatise. DeBryn looks at Morse, lying with his head raised a couple of inches off the ground, face captured in a tight expression of pain. His own heart is still pounding hard in his chest, ache fading now but not yet gone. “You’ve been shot,” he says, tartly. “When that happens, you _call an ambulance_.” He runs his hands carefully around the back of Morse’s thigh and finds no exit wound, as expected.

“It’s not bad,” protests Morse through gritted teeth, eyes on DeBryn’s hands.

DeBryn fishes gloves, gauze and alcohol out of his kit. “Pardon me, ought I to have congratulated you on your recent acquisition of a medical degree?” He pulls on the gloves, then bundles the gauze up into pads and wets them with the alcohol. “Oh no, that’s right, you don’t have one. This is going to hurt,” he adds, in a softer voice. He glances at Thursday, who takes Morse’s arm as he begins wiping the blood from the surface of the wound. At the first pass Morse hisses, at the second he screams. DeBryn sets his face into impassivity and carries on, quickly and neatly until the wound is clean.

“Bloody hell,” gasps someone from behind, just as he’s finishing; DeBryn swivels to see a familiar man – Strange, he thinks, although he’s in mufti – standing in the doorway.

“Oh good. You can go and fetch my medical kit from the car, as no one informed me I would be needing it. It’s in the boot.” His hand is shaking as he reaches into his pocket for his keys, but by the time he finds them – taking perhaps longer than is necessary to fish them from his pocket – the tremor is gone. The constable takes them, staring at Morse wide-eyed all the while, but he goes without being prompted. 

There are other men arriving as well – the crime scene investigators, and the men from the coroner’s office to take the bodies. 

Morse is quiet now, breathing hard to recover from the pain, and Thursday stands to go deal with the new arrivals. “I suppose this will learn you to opt for the pathologist for treatment,” he says, applying light pressure and watching Morse’s eyes wrinkle at the corners. “They would give you morphine in Casualty.”

Morse shakes his head jerkily, the tendons in his neck raised with the tension of his clenched jaw. “It’s fine. It’s – I trust you.” He’s staring at the ceiling, pupils very dilated, eyes startlingly blue. 

“That’s very gratifying, but not quite the issue at hand,” begins DeBryn frowning. Just then Strange appears from behind him, bag in hand. 

“I’m in rather a hurry,” says Morse, tightly.

DeBryn raises his eyebrows. “I imagine so,” he replies, not bothering to reiterate that an ambulance would have gotten him care faster.

He gets the wound patched up rudimentarily without too much trouble, adding in a shot of penicillin for good measure. 

“You’re lucky; missed the bone and any major blood vessels. The bullet’s still in there, mind,” he tells Morse, “probably with a good deal of fabric, waiting to spawn an infection. I can’t take it out, not with the equipment I have here. You need to get that seen to immediately.”

He watches as Strange and Thursday help Morse up between them, Strange acting as his crutch out of the house. He finds Morse’s silence disturbing. “I’ve made as best a running repair as I can,” he repeats, hurrying along behind, “but you need to get yourself to Casualty.”

“I don’t have time,” Morse says cryptically, as Strange helps him into the Jaguar. Thursday gets in with him, and they pull off into the darkness without another word. 

DeBryn stands there on the pavement with Morse’s blood cooling on his gloved hands, watching the red lights disappear into the distance. “Would you care to tell me what that was about?” he asks, acidly. 

“It’s his father, doctor,” says Strange, beside him. “He’s in a bad way, up in Lincolnshire. Morse started up earlier, but Inspector Thursday got in a bit deep on a case and he came back down.”

DeBryn softens somewhat, shaking his head. “He’d just better look after himself.”

“Inspector Thursday’ll see to him, sir, I’m sure,” says Strange helpfully, ushering him back inside. “I’d’ve thought you and Morse would get along,” he adds, looking slightly disappointed. “Lots in common.”

“Really?” asks DeBryn, dryly. “This way to the other corpse, is it?”

\-----------------------------------------------------

He doesn’t see Morse in February, but it doesn’t strike him as too odd – it’s a short month, and he shares no files with Thursday’s department. But as March begins to pass by and he doesn’t see Morse at TOSCA, or on the street outside of Cowley station when passing by, he begins to become suspicious. And also, although he wouldn’t admit it aloud, he misses the odd friendship they have struck up. The discovery of a corpse in an empty lot in Cowley could hardly be called providential, but DeBryn is simultaneously pleased and disappointed to see Thursday and Jakes turn up – pleased they’ve been assigned the case, but disappointed by Morse’s absence.

The corpse is straight-forward enough – stab-wound in the upper abdomen from a short blade, death in about ten minutes. He reports his findings to Thursday while Jakes prowls around looking in empty drums and along the walls of the lot, hands kept fastidiously in his pockets. 

“Constable Morse not in today?” DeBryn asks casually, closing his book as he finishes. Thursday looks up sharply, eyes flaring, and DeBryn realises with surprise that he’s very close to fury. “Inspector? I’m sorry – I’m missing something.”

Thursday relaxes, shoulders lowering, some of the tension bleeding out of his face. “I’m sorry doctor; I thought you knew. Morse has been temporarily reassigned to the County Police in Witney.”

DeBryn stares, trying to find one question to latch onto in the sudden proliferation of them. “ _Why?_ ”

“He failed his medical examination. It seems he was behind in seeing a surgeon, and that resulted in infection and inflammation, which in turn resulted in unsteadiness and a limp, and ultimately in his failing the exam. County wouldn’t bother with the paperwork and billeting for less than three months, so he’ll be back in May.” Thursday reports it in a matter-of-fact tone, but with the flat repetition of a man grinding out words he hates and resents. 

DeBryn can feel his own anger creeping over him, cold and sharp as ice, settling into his bones hard and thick so he feels he might almost creak if he moves abruptly. “He didn’t go to Casualty. He didn’t get it seen to,” he says. “Not that day. When?”

Thursday gives him a long, evaluating look. All inspectors are of course responsible for looking out for the men under their command, more so if they’re young and green. But Thursday’s done more than that for Morse – and received far more in return – and that bond of mentorship and friendship makes him very tight-lipped when it comes to anything that might seem to deprecate Morse. 

Finally he sighs and tucks his hands into his pockets, stance loosening as his tight gaze fades into a look of dissatisfaction. “I don’t know. His father died in the night. I saw him the next day; his leg didn’t seem to be bothering him, and he was to see the doctor then. 

“But he didn’t,” DeBryn says, coldly, hands fisted at his sides. He feels extraordinarily stiff, like a statue carved from ice, ready to shatter with the first sign of thaw. 

Thursday sighs. “Apparently not.” He’s still watching DeBryn, and something about the doctor’s cold anger seems to drive Thursday to speak up for his bagman. “He seemed very… far away, washed out… like a water-colour – not just physically, but emotionally, when I left. As I said, I don’t know what happened. All I know is that he had it seen to by the time he came back three days later.”

“Three days. Four, counting the first.” The damage the bullet alone could have done to the muscle, constantly scraping and tearing as Morse walked and stood and sat, is huge. But the real risk lay with the fabric carried in with the bullet – the many layers of Morse’s clothes, all now disintegrating in his body with whatever microscopic organisms they carried. And the longer he waited, the more the fabrics would shed organisms, and the further they would spread, making collection by the surgeon difficult at best.

All of which he had directly enabled by seeing to a man he knew to have a poor record of self-care.

His horror must show on his face because some of it at least passes to Thursday who frowns, worried. “Doctor?”

DeBryn shakes himself loose of the paralysis of the initial distress, burying his anger below the surface. “It’s nothing,” he says, briskly, “Just my usual dismay at the lack of common sense displayed by members of the constabulary. I’ll phone through my full report later.”

He turns his back on Thursday, ignoring the inspector’s confused look, and packs up the pathology box in a series of quick, savage blows to its drawers. As he stumps out of the empty lot he hears Jakes asking the DI, “What’s got his goat?”

That night he begins three letters to Morse, each more acerbic than the last as he steadily drinks his way through half a bottle of sherry. In the end he dumps all three in the wastepaper basket and goes to bed with a roaring headache. 

\--------------------------------------------

The first DeBryn knows of Morse’s return to Oxford is a sudden shadow in his peripheral vision on the rates office roof; without the correction of his glasses he can only see a golden blur and pale skin. He looks over and sees Morse standing right beside him, peering over the edge without getting too close. 

It’s been two months, long enough for DeBryn’s anger to have faded first into irritation, and from there into a gentle prickle of touchiness. “Off heights, are we?” he asks, curtly, feeling it under his skin now. Morse looks surprised, but gives a slight shrug.

“Lately, funnily enough.” He gives an odd little smile, pained and self-deprecating. Morse has never been jolly at crime scenes but he seems downright miserable today, shoulders curled inwards protectively, eyes slightly narrowed as if against pain or a bright light. In light of it, DeBryn sighs and pushes away the remains of his peevishness. 

“Not how I’d my own quietus make,” he tells Morse, as the constable steps over to look at the dead man’s spectacles. “But then he wouldn’t have known much about it. Instantaneous.”

He gives Morse the rest of the details, such as he knows of them. He can tell he’s being overly loquacious, but Morse is being overly silent and he can’t help but try to fill the void. He remembers Thursday’s description of Morse after his father’s death – washed out, like a water-colour – and knows now what the inspector meant. 

“Nothing suspicious?” asks Morse.

“Only you, Morse,” says DeBryn, smiling. It’s a beautiful May day, the sun is shining, and Morse has just returned to Oxford after three month’s absence. He’s suddenly feeling, to his surprise, quite cheerful. 

DeBryn doesn’t expect an explanation, or even an apology – he knows Morse well enough to have a realistic idea about the likelihood of that – but he does expect … a greeting, a comment, an invitation for a pint. A goodbye, even.

What he gets is a thin smile, and then Morse is gone, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell. And like a blue sky covered by a sudden thunderstorm, DeBryn’s good humour vanishes abruptly, replaced by a black temper.

\-----------------------------------------------

Alone in his sitting room that evening, DeBryn gets through his first glass of brandy and pours himself a second in short order before it occurs to him that Morse is beginning to drive him to drink – an irritating enough thought in and of itself to make him pause. He pours the glass more slowly, setting down the decanter, and then reaches up to his bookcase and pulls down some volumes. 

DeBryn places no particular value in appearances or undue quality where unnecessary. His books are mismatched, mostly canvas-backed and picked up cheaply in one of the town’s many used-book stores by students abandoning them at the end of term. They’re all clean copies, thin pages smelling only of dust and ink. 

He reads for a while from Pope, familiar and calming, and then from a new slim volume of Suckling, which he isn’t in the mood for at all. He puts the Cavalier poet aside and takes up an anthology of Oxford poets, letting the book fall open where it will. It lands upon Housman; DeBryn frowns, he’s maudlin enough as it is. He flips past the excerpts from _A Shropshire Lad_ and comes upon a last piece, not of that work. “Shake Hands.” He reads it through once, twice, throat drying up. 

It encompasses in fact very little of their sentiment or situation. But none the less it speaks to him – the vexation, the frustration, and despite that the remaining willingness to be there when needed. 

More, though, it is the poem’s angle that suddenly, sharply, brings a clarity he had been lacking. He had ignored the issue in December, and obfuscated it in January, and in March when the floodgates of his rage opened there was no room for calm reflection, but here and now there’s no longer any ability to deny that whatever he feels for Morse goes beyond simple friendship. 

DeBryn puts down the tumbler, taking off his glasses and setting them down on the book in his lap. He rubs slowly at the bridge of his nose, feeling no shock, no protest, only a slow settling into certainty as the seconds tick by. He only has to think of any one of a dozen interactions with Morse to know it – a cutting remark on the perceived future of the Latin curriculum; a high-brow remark at a crime scene that wasn’t meant to be; a fleeting, shy smile; the slim line of his back; his hair burning bright as a brand in the summer sun. 

“That’s enough of that.” DeBryn stops himself, voice shaky, and picks up his glasses. 

Shaking hands and going separate ways is no option, nor does he see the need for it. By far the safest course is to ignore his feelings – to suppress them until they fade, or until he no longer notices them. Safest, and indeed probably the only thing possible. Reciprocation, after all, is beyond considering.

\-----------------------------------------------

It’s a couple days later as he’s stopping by Cowley station to speak to DI McNutt about an accidental death in Jericho that he sees Morse again. DeBryn is just getting out as the constable comes thundering down the front stairs, raincoat flapping behind him, expression stormy. His nose and upper maxilla are phenomenally bruised, a narrow but deep laceration running across the bridge of his nose. 

Morse catches sight of DeBryn staring as he strides out and pulls up, stopping on the kerb by the passenger door. His eyes shift to the car for a few moments before he speaks, rather hesitantly. “Doctor – I don’t suppose I could impose on you,” he begins.

DeBryn considers refusing, but he knows Morse well enough to know that his first refusal would be his last. And if he’s low enough to ask for a ride, he must need one. DeBryn inclines his head; he can see McNutt later. “Very well.”

“I’ve moved,” says Morse; DeBryn glances at him, and he gives a careless shake of his head. “I couldn’t find anyone to sublet while I was out of town, and it’s not as though I had many belongings.” 

The address he gives is no further away, but in a slightly grungier neighbourhood. DeBryn declines to comment. “What happened to you, then?” he asks instead, eyes on the road. 

“I ran into some trouble in London. Investigating Pettifer – the man off the rates office roof. There was someone waiting for me in his office; he hit me from behind, and I must’ve fallen into a table. After that a disgruntled client came by and mistook me for him – got in a few good blows. Copper, too,” he adds, disgusted.

“Eventful life you lead. What’s it all about?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe the dead girl, Frida Yelland. Or the stolen Wolvercote Trove. Or both.” Morse runs a hand through his hair, frowning deeply in concentration. And then he sits back abruptly, yanking his hand out and slapping it down on his leg sharply. DeBryn glances at him in surprise, and sees anger warring with distress. “Either way, it doesn’t matter; I’ve been sent home. Back on leave.”

They pull into the street, a long curved row of tall white buildings, the street slumped crookedly and the pavement set through with deep fissures. There are iron railings along the pavement, and rubbish has been left scattered here and there against them where it’s fallen out of bins or been abandoned intentionally. DeBryn pulls up by Morse’s building, shutting off the engine. 

“Would you like to come up? There’s sure to be something to drink.” Morse hauls himself out of the car without waiting for an answer. DeBryn slowly removes the keys, and follows. Given his conflicted emotions, if Morse had been otherwise he would have made an excuse to leave. But there’s something very off about the constable, a kind of restless energy that makes DeBryn wary of leaving him alone. 

Morse’s flat is much the same as his former – much the same as cheap pre-furnished bed-sits everywhere. He dumps his raincoat on a chair and heads directly into the kitchen area, picking up a bottle of scotch; DeBryn surreptitiously checks his watch – 3:10. Morse pours out a few fingers for each of them, seating himself in the armchair and shedding his suit jacket, then his tie. DeBryn raises his eyebrows, and Morse gives a little embarrassed wince.

“I was hoping – I’m sorry to ask, but could you –”

DeBryn puts his glass down slowly on the table and leans back. “Could I what? Fix you? Is that what you’re asking?”

Morse pauses, suddenly watchful. “I suppose it is,” he says, cautiously.

“No,” says DeBryn, immediately, unequivocally.

Morse straightens, hurt. “Why?” 

“Because, Morse, I’m not going to go on helping you break yourself. When I offer you assistance, you seem to use it as a free extension on your usual activities rather than respecting my requirements and caveats. The result is more profound medical distress later. Part of that’s your responsibility, but part of it falls to me – and I don’t want to be responsible for your injuries, for your disabilities, for your – for you, Morse.” He can’t spit out the words he would have otherwise, heart and throat rebelling in synchronism, and he makes a clumsy substitution. Even in his sudden flash of anger, just a spark compared to the rage he remembers from March, he can’t voice the thought of being responsible for Morse’s death. 

“That’s not – I’m not your responsibility,” protests Morse, “I make my own decisions, it’s up to me to live with them.”

“If I hadn’t helped you after you were shot, you would have gone to Casualty and been seen to immediately, and you would have recovered without incident. You would never have failed your medical examination and been transferred to Witney.”

“And my father would have died without me there. I’m grateful to you!”

DeBryn raises his eyebrows. “Are you? What’s happened to you – jumped in London, getting thrown off the investigation, scotch in the middle of the day?”

“I was shot,” snaps Morse, standing abruptly and walking past DeBryn to the kitchen. He’s not going for anything, just moving for the sake of it, his hands fisting and unfisting. He turns and walks back, standing against the wall facing DeBryn, arms crossed tightly over his chest, fingers playing with the fabric of his shirt. “That’s what Inspector Thursday thinks – says.”

“He’s a smart man,” says DeBryn carefully, closing his own hands to crush the urge to still Morse’s fingers with them. “I imagine he saw a lot of it in the war. Is he right?” 

Morse stares at him, tense as a bowstring. The bruising on his face gives him the appearance of a man wearing a mask, a slim purple domino, and he looks through it with wild eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” he snaps. “All that matters is that I’m stuck back in limbo.”

“I think that’s a rather casual dismissal of –”

“I don’t need analysing, doctor, nor am I interested in it.” He strides past DeBryn towards the door and stops pointedly beside it, face cold. “Thanks for the lift. Sorry to waste your time.”

DeBryn stares for a moment, waiting for him to change his mind; then shakes his head. “Right.” He leaves without a goodbye. Behind him, the door closes. A moment later, there’s a heavy thump from the adjoining wall: the sound of a fist being slammed into it. 

\------------------------------------------------------

Most of the time DeBryn doesn’t notice the smell of the carbolic soap anymore, just as he doesn’t notice the slight slope in the ground towards the drain, or the stiffness in the autopsy table’s front left wheel. He’s been noticing all of them – or re-noticing them – in the past two days. Those little irritants and dozens like them – the way the cleaners mop into the corner, leaving a dark stain there; the way the elevator lurches when it reaches the basement level; the way his car’s breaks always squeal just as he begins to apply pressure.

He always did become detail-oriented when angry. 

He’s washing his hands when the doors to the morgue open, hinges squeaking as they pass the half-way point (another irritant). “Be with you in a minute,” he calls, finishing washing off the suds.

“No hurry,” says a low, familiar voice. 

DeBryn resists the urge to turn around, finishes washing instead, then dries his hands before looking around. 

It is indeed Morse, standing by the empty autopsy table as if to prove he can do it, looking much more himself. 

“Ah, Morse,” says DeBryn, cuttingly. “Should I fetch my car keys?” 

Morse winces, almost imperceptibly, just a twitch of his eye. “I came to apologize for my words, and my behaviour. I hadn’t considered the responsibility I placed on you in asking for your help, both immediately and post facto. It was an unaccountable oversight, and I’m sorry. As for my behaviour the other day, it was disgraceful, and I apologize for that as well.”

He stands there in the middle of the morgue looking earnest and repentant, and also just a little nervous, like a man waiting to hear whether a diagnosis is going to be favourable or not. He has his coat under his arm, and for the first time DeBryn notices that he’s lost weight during his months away. Still, the washed-out look of the other day is gone, and his feyness with it.

DeBryn nods slowly. “Very well: apology accepted. But I won’t be acting as your physician again, Morse. Not until I see more substantive proof of a change in practice, at least.”

Morse gives a weak smile, tension draining from his shoulders. “Fair enough.”

DeBryn waits for a moment, and then, when nothing else seems forthcoming: “Was there something else?” He asks, obtusely. He’s going to make Morse work for it. After all, he has a right, he feels. An apology doesn’t make up for three months of silence. 

Morse’s smile slowly melts away, replaced by sombreness, and DeBryn realises that Morse hasn’t come to ask after a pint. He puts his coat down on the gurney and rubs at the cuff of his sleeve. “You asked me about the shooting – what happened. Why – why…” he trails off. “It’s not what Inspector Thursday thinks – not really, or wholly.” 

Morse moves slowly around the gurney towards DeBryn, eyes now focused on something in the distance, or maybe the past. “I see it – in my dreams, sometimes, but mostly when I’m awake. At night, when I’m trying to sleep, usually, sometimes other places. The gun, the shot and her. She died right there in front of me, choking on her blood. Inspector Thursday killed her to save me; he walked right by her without stopping. And she just… died.” His eyes snap back to DeBryn, wide, intense. 

DeBryn swallows silently, not allowing the wave of remorse and irritation that suddenly sweeps over him to show on his face. It’s been three months since the shooting – has no one talked to Morse about this? But of course they haven’t, because Morse stranded himself in Witney and has the social awareness and outgoingness of a hermit. DeBryn would be shocked if he’d even seen anyone from Oxford more than once or twice during his seclusion.

He looks at Morse earnestly, allowing none of this to make its way into his features. “Do you blame him?” he asks, calmly. 

Morse shakes his head. “No. I’m sure – I would have done the same thing.”

“Do you blame yourself?”

He shakes his head again, more slowly this time but no less definitively. “No. I just… see her, sometimes.” He’s trying to speak casually, to let the words roll out as though they mean nothing, but his voice betrays him. It catches, thick and heavy, and DeBryn knows it’s more than just sometimes that Morse sees Millicent Coke-Norris. 

DeBryn steps over to him, concerned. “Morse, you – ” he puts his hand on Morse’s arm and feels Morse tense abruptly, then pull away. He lifts his hand away, trying not to feel hurt. “Sorry.”

“No – no – it’s…” Morse pushes a hand through his hair in frustration. “I’m sorry. I didn’t finish – I was going to say – since solving the case, it’s been much better. I can only imagine that my anxieties were fuelling it. And really, I don’t know why I’m saying all of this anyway, other than that I owe you some kind of explanation for my behaviour.”

“And because it’s true, I expect,” says DeBryn, practically. “And perhaps because you don’t have anyone else to tell it to. I can’t imagine it’s easy to admit what might seem like weakness to colleagues.” 

Morse raises his eyebrows noncommittally. “Perhaps.” 

“The memories – they still bother you?”

Morse shrugs.

“More than you’d like to admit,” concludes DeBryn. “Why didn’t you say anything when I was over at your flat the other day?”

There’s a pause, Morse suddenly cautious. He licks his lips, breathing speeding up – and DeBryn wonders when it was that he got close enough to notice Morse’s breathing. He’s too close, far too close, but there’s no way to back up without distracting Morse. “I wasn’t at my best, wasn’t thinking straight – I knew enough to know that. I’d already torched one thing that day; I was afraid to ruin another.”

“Meaning?” asks DeBryn, puzzled. Morse shakes his head in irritation.

“Who knows – anything. I was too wound up to talk about it – if I’d told you, I would have just bitten your head off the first question you asked, or rubbed your nose in something.”

“So you chased me out. Cruel to be kind?” says DeBryn, with faint sarcasm.

Morse starts and DeBryn sees genuine hurt there, and regrets his jab. “No – just selfishness. Like I said – I didn’t want to torch both my job and our friendship in one afternoon.” He’s folding inwards now, the way he does when the weight of the world starts getting too much. 

Something doesn’t make sense. Morse’s fear – both then, and the shadow of it that remains now – seems disproportionate. And since when has Morse had a fear of rowing?

“Why did you invite me up in the first place then? Why did you want me to examine you?” DeBryn asks, and in the slight widening of Morse’s eyes sees the arrow hit the gold. 

“What do you mean?”

“You said you were injured in London, but your injuries weren’t really very severe.” 

“I suppose not enough to warrant an official examination, but – ”

“I know, because I saw you stand up and sit down at least twice, without any apparent sign of physical discomfort. It’s not as though you could expect me to do much about a few blows to the gut, in any case. So why the request?”

Morse steps back, shrinking further inwards and dropping his eyes. “It’s nothing – I was just – concerned – didn’t want to be invalided out again…”

“That’s why you waited a day to happen upon me in the street?” asks DeBryn, dryly. And then, more truthfully – more painfully: “Do you really trust me so little? What’s really the matter, Morse? What are you afraid of?”

Morse looks up, blue eyes flashing under the bright fluorescent lights, and swallows. “I was here in late December, not long before the shooting; you explained the location of a skull fracture to me.”

DeBryn nods. “I recall,” he says, in fact doing his best not to. Not to remember his fingers in Morse’s hair, the heat of Morse’s body beside him in the chill of the morgue – it seems like madness, looking back on it. 

Morse’s eyes fall, apparently to his hands, resting in front of him as he speaks. “I realised then that I had let go of my past. And – that I like your hands,” he says, simply. He’s turned partially towards the door, standing very still, ready to move in an instant. Ready to leave.

It’s not, DeBryn realises, his own hands Morse is looking at. 

For a moment DeBryn can picture Morse as he was two days ago, battered and scarred and alone, unable to ask for what he wanted – someone to touch him, care for him, comfort him – only for someone to assess his bruising and check his ribs. And, when that fell through and DeBryn pressed him to speak about his trauma while his control was crumbling, he pushed DeBryn out rather than accidentally reveal his heart by look or gesture. 

DeBryn swallows past the sudden roughness in his throat, trying to smooth it. His heart is abruptly pounding hard in his chest and he attempts to calm it, breathing slowly and deeply. “‘And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men’?” he asks, raising his eyebrows slightly in gentle self-deprecation. 

He closes the distance between them in a step and, watching Morse’s face, lays his hand on Morse’s arm. “You somehow manage to make yourself very unforgettable,” he tells Morse, with plain sincerity. “It feels good to know the favour’s been returned.” He means to say it very dryly, but Morse is smiling now – a rather appealing kind of shy pleasure – and DeBryn can’t help but reciprocate.

“I’d like to see you again – now, in fact,” says Morse, now more confident in himself, leaning in closer. He’s nearer now than he was in December, more than near enough for DeBryn to feel the warmth of his body, and definitely near enough to incite recklessness in this public building. DeBryn slips his hand a little lower on Morse’s arm and surreptitiously takes his pulse at the medial of the wrist – racing. “Are you free?”

DeBryn has the sudden, ridiculous thought that at this moment, he would stand up the Queen. “I believe so,” he says, with what gravity he can muster. “Would you care to come over for a drink? We have rather a lot of catching up to do, it seems.” And quite a lot more, starting with running his hands through Morse’s perennially-tousled hair and working his way down from there. 

Morse nods. “I’d like that,” he says, rather huskily.

DeBryn inclines his head approvingly. “I’ll fetch my car keys.” 

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DeBryn quotes Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H."
> 
> Of course canonically in Home Morse is brought out at the same time as the corpses. However, this makes little to no sense unless all DeBryn does is pronounce, and even then it assumes he at some point stops caring for Morse to go do that while Morse's bleeding on the floor, which seems unlikely. So I tossed that.

**Author's Note:**

> narrativeimperative and athena_crikey continue tackling the unconventional pairings


End file.
